The latest rare gem offering for Bejeweled Blitz has finished beta and has been unleashed on us all. The Kanga Ruby.

The kangaroo comes out at the end of each round, which is indicated by the timer at the top of the screen. He comes out and punches and kicks gems. You can speed up each round by matching more red gems – surprise surprise. And at the start of each game that you have a Kanga Ruby boost enabled, the red gems are highlighted in obvious patterns to help you along.

I managed to get the prisms to appear without much effort. I am still unclear as to what triggers their appearance. I’m glad I had a LOT of coins to purchase the prism though. At 75,000 coins a pop, it’s not cheap!

I can’t say I’m particularly keen on it yet. It detonates gems that I was going to match, so it currently annoys me.

It did, however, let me get my best score ever! 918,500!!! Woohoo!

I had to take screenshots from the video replay since the Phoenix Prism happens so quickly, and with so many animations, there was no chance I could do screencaps quickly enough. And there is no number 8 screen cap – I didn’t notice until I’d already uploaded them to wordPress that I’d failed at counting. Oh well.

It’s cute that the reborn phoenix (which looks a lot like an owl, if you ask me!) winks at you.

Yeah, so it’s almost Christmas. Halloween is not that big here in Oz, and I’ve been a bit busy. But I did find time to get the Halloween backgrounds. Even the 8x multiplier one. So, in answer two my two commenters on my previous post about the backgrounds, here are the Halloween Bejeweled Blitz backgrounds.

Something I noticed, but never until now confirmed was that the background artwork seemed to change.
Every time you activate a score multiplier, the background picture changes.
I even managed to activate an 8x multiplier! Really close to the end of the game, with the free multiplier boost active, so that’s why the final image was taken during the last hurrah. RAINBOWS!

Finally, the artwork is noticed! :)

Update: I managed to get a screenshot of the rainbows while they were still nice and bright! yay!

I’ve recently noticed a few bugs with boosts and the Moonstone Gem appearing (or, rather, not appearing), and decided I should let PopCap know about it.

hey there popcap team.
I’ve had the moonstone gem appear, and I buy it and twice now it has not actually rendered on the game that shows up next, but my coins get taken. :( not so much of an issue since i play it all the time and have lots of coins, but it might make other players unhappy to lose 25k worth of coins.
it also sometimes happens with boosts. they dont render the first time around, but then they appear for the 2nd and 3rd uses. which means you miss out on the first use. it doesnt always happen, but it does happen.
please look into it if you can.
thanks!

(Yeah, yeah, I was lazy with my capitalisation and apostrophes)

I had not really expected any response, since I am sure they probably get lots and lots of messages.

So, I logged into play Bejeweled Blitz today and was surprised to see I had a lot more coins than I remembered having. About 100k more. I checked my email and saw this response from PopCap:

Thanks for your message.

We have adjusted your coin balance.

We will pass this information on to our Quality Assurance department. We appreciate your patience.

Thank You,
The Bejeweled Blitz Team

Thank you PopCap. For giving us a great, fun game to play, and for taking our feedback seriously. Keep up the good work!

I finally got around to it and took screenshot of the stats (well, it actually took 15 screenshots and a bit of trickery, but who’s counting?).

That’s a total of 7495 star medals that I’ve accumulated since PopCap started keeping stats. It’s pretty close to the number of games I’ve played since I so rarely score less than 25k.

I wonder how many games other people have played?

I’m also reminded why I was prompted to actually make a count – the “once in a century” thing that’s mentioned when the Moonstone Rare Gem appears. I took these screenshots just after my second Moonstone. That was two days ago. I got my third Moonstone today. Did I play 100 games between the second and third? According to my star badges: no. Apparently I’ve won only 19 star badges between the two. But I’m sure I’ve played a -lot- more games than that!